CONCURRENT ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT AND PRACTICES FOR AIRCRAFT DESIGN AT AIRBUS

Reduction of cycles (development time, series lead time) and costs along the aircraft lifecycle is a permanent priority. Concurrent engineering aims at enabling this reduction, by putting together in a multidisciplinary way of working all the relevant skills contributing to product engineering, and by setting and managing the operational conditions for work in parallel. It is mainly a question of processes and way of working. For maximum business benefit, its implementation requires a strong sponsorship at top level, and discipline throughout the organizations, in order to define and fully apply common processes and common methods, supported by common tools. The Digital Mock-up (DMU) becomes the heart of the product information. It is created with the support of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and is managed by a Product Data Management (PDM) system that also supports the industrial drawing release process and configuration management. Practical operations in concurrent engineering lead to significant business benefits, which can be measured in terms of lead-time and reduction of effort in development. These benefits have now been made visible for the development of the A340500 and A340-600, and for the A380. As a vision, Airbus expects further integration steps in the design office technology, targeting a Virtual Aircraft, with stronger links between Systems Engineering (including Architectural Design and Requirement Based Engineering), Design to Decision Objectives around the DMU, and supported by the PDM. 1 Business context and programmes requirements